Mammoth: The Resurrection of an Ice Age Giant - Softcover

Stone, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1841155187 ISBN 13: 9781841155180

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 2003

Synopsis

A real walk with a dinosaur, as two teams of scientists race to bring back to life the long-extinct woolly mammoth, using DNA from a frozen mammoth discovered in a cliff face in Northern Siberia.

Advances in medical and scientific technology mean that the impossible is now theoretically possible: a mammoth can be cloned from a frozen, long-dead mammoth corpse. But it’s not easy. No one knows for sure how long frozen mammoth sperm keeps. Elephant sperm keeps well, but the mammoth has been extinct since at least 4000 years ago. But the mammoth remains a vividly real image: huge, with great curving tusks it is both utterly familiar and completely unknown. The discovery of a frozen mammoth in a crumbling Siberian cliff face attracted two teams of scientists, one French, one Japanese, to attempt to recreate it. At issue is both a moral and a technical question: is the preservation of species through improved reproductive biology to be applauded? Does this extend to reviving extinct species? And, if so, which should tread on the Earth’s surface again, defying their Darwinian extinction? Combining a gripping adventure story with a depiction of contemporary scientific powers, Mammoth is both a gripping drama and cautionary tale of two teams of pioneers as they approach the moment when they can play god: they will decide if the woolly mammoth walks again.

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Review

Richard Stone's Mammoth offers a kindred scenario to that made famous by Jurassic Park: the establishment of a "Pleistocene Park" in which long-extinct creatures like the mammoth, sabre-toothed tiger, and woolly rhino could be resurrected and given sanctuary.

This is not a science-fiction vision, we learn from science journalist Stone's absorbing journey into recent prehistory; already scientists from Russia, Canada, the United States and other nations are studying the possibility of restoring a stretch of northern Siberia to its Pleistocene condition, thereby creating what they call a "mammoth steppe" populated by bison, Yakutian horses and elephants--and one day, perhaps, creatures such as the woolly mammoth, genetically "summoned from the world of the dead". The materials are readily available, Stone writes, in the form of DNA-bearing "muscles and ligaments and fat" found in mammoths now buried in arctic permafrost; whether those remnants can be made to bring back to life what Siberians call the "rat beneath the ice" is another question, but one that many scholars are busily exploring.

While looking into what he calls "a watershed in efforts to study lost ecosystems", Stone provides a lively natural history of the mammoth and evaluates conflicting theories on its extinction. His book makes for a memorable journey into unknown scientific territory--and a glimpse at a possible future that is surpassing strange. --Gregory McNamee

Review

'I was all but impelled to go and search for mammoths myself: except that I can't stand the cold.' Anthony Daniels, Sunday Telegraph

'Entertainingly told...A splendid account.' Financial Times

'A nicely judged mix of adventure, history and scientific instruction.' Guardian

'The mammoth was the first animal to be proven extinct. Will cloning technology ever reverse that brute absence? Richard Stone thinks it will...Entertaining.' New Scientist

'Part history of our knowledge of the mammoth, part travelogue to Siberia and part account of modern scientific schemes to resurrect the mammoth by means of genetic engineering...always readable.' Anthony Daniels, Sunday Telegraph

About this edition

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1841155187
• ISBN 13: 9781841155180
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256